Living in a Material World
Raymond Williams's Long Revolution

When Raymond Williams describes an act of the mind he assumes that
both its individual and its social circumstances must be taken into
account: without falling for determinist equations, he never forgets
that human works are inextricable from human lives. That's my kind of
social theorist, and my kind of socialist intellectual--yours too, I
hope. Yet it took me 15 years to get serious about him--starting in
1968, when I noticed his name looming up at me from various newish
British popular culture bibliographies, through 1976, when forays from
pop into alienated-artist territory led me to his renowned Culture
and Society, to just a few years ago, when I finally cracked
The Country and the City and then Orwell and then
Marxism and Literature and then . . . My reluctant conversion
is far from atypical, especially among Americans, most of whom remain
merely reluctant. Again and again I meet properly left-leaning
academics who profess vast respect for the man and then politely
dredge up the title of another book of his they've read. But forget
academics--it's the laity I want. If inquiring college graduates (and
dropouts) can read Milan Kundera and Roland Barthes and Dick Hebdige
and William Gass, they can damn well read Williams, a richer writer,
book by book or all in all, than any of them.

I go to Williams first for information. Working from an ambit of
interest that embraces all human aspiration, he's mastered a
distinctive and formidable body of knowledge by concentrating on
(while never limiting himself to) examples drawn from English
literature. Though this method is more professorial than one would
like, it's less professorial than would appear. This is true because
Williams defines his subject so that it extends beyond the details of
thousands of books, beyond Jonson's patronage and Gissing's
bohemianism and Lawrence's education, beyond even Smith's bookstalls
and Northcliffe's newspapers. But it's also because Williams's ambit
of interest induces him to investigate his examples from
unconventional angles. He insists on connecting works to lives--the
lives of readers and intermediaries as well as creators, all of them
understood critically, psychologically, and politically. He loves the
literature of the past, but resists the highbrow temptation to be put
off by the contemporary world. And though I can't claim his style is
scintillating, I do find his presentation tonic. One of the pleasures
of Kundera and Barthes and Gass is their elegant self-referentiality,
the way their books double back on themselves like the self-enclosed
systems of signs they're implicitly acknowledged to be. Insofar as
it's possible, Williams rejects this formalist gambit. He believes
words refer to real things which precede language, and that's the way
he writes. He's devoted to content--which in his terms means he's
devoted to politics.

Williams is described by New Left Books, the staunchest of his many
publishers, as "the most productive and influential socialist writer
in England today." Although along with Stuart Hall and E.P. Thompson
(as well as Hall's mentor and Williams's fellow left-Leavisite
Hoggart) he's credited with laying the theoretical groundwork for
Britain's new left, many would grant pride of influence to Thompson,
who in recent years has been instrumental in remobilizing the moribund
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. But unlike Thompson (whose roots are
in Quaker radicalism) and like Hall (who is Jamaican and
working-class), Williams (who is Welsh and working-class) has managed
to keep talking to all sides during sectarian feuds. And in any case
no one will deny Williams's astounding productivity--one reason,
though there are certainly others, for his almost as astounding sales
totals, now up over a million worldwide.

Counting three collaborations but leaving out revisions, which in at
least three cases have been major, the 1984 collection Writing in
Society was Williams's 25th book, ready just months after number
24, The Year 2000. Though the first appeared in 1950, when he
was 29, Williams only gained recognition with number five, 1958's
Culture and Society, and not until the '70s did his output
begin to gather critical mass: 14 of his 25 titles have been published
since 1971. Nor has Williams confined production to books. Until 1961,
when he was invited back to Cambridge to lecture in drama, he made his
living teaching workers evening classes, and he has been a busy
essayist and reviewer as well as a playwright. He's surfaced
politically at crucial junctures, and raised three children with his
wife of 42 years. In 1982, he retired from Cambridge to write (as New
Left Books rather dauntingly puts it) "full-time." Georges Simenon
watch out.

Williams's prolific habits have left me feeling as if I'd better sit
down and write full-time myself before the old man laps me again, an
indignity I've suffered three times since this essay was conceived as
a way of celebrating Columbia University Press's new (1983) edition of
Culture and Society. Especially given Williams's obsessive
thoroughness, though, I'm still not sure I feel ready; having read 16
of his books (not all of which are easy to come by even in what
Williams, with uncharacteristic levity, refers to as "the Yookay"), I
don't intend to stop. I'm curious about Preface to Film (with
Michael Orrom, 1954), one of the first attempts by a critic of
Williams's loft to analyze popular culture at length, and The
English Novel From Dickens to Lawrence (1971), constructed from
lecture notes and therefore, it is said, somewhat less dense than most
of his nonfiction. An enthusiastic admirer of his working-class novels
Border Country (1960) and Second Generation (1964), I'm
eager to locate the thriller-influenced Volunteers (1978) and
the science fiction-influenced Fight for Manod (1979). For me,
Williams isn't just a fecund and significant and immensely useful
writer. He's an enjoyable and even exciting one.

Which is not to suggest that Georges Simenon has anything to worry
about. As someone who makes it his business to recognize serious fun
when it kicks him in the head, I can guarantee that Williams doesn't
qualify. Lumpy, slightly turgid, unabashedly Latinate, he just isn't a
writer with much entertainment value. Not only can't he go up against
Simenon as beach reading, he can't go up against Thompson. The
semipopular novels and broadcast dramas he's essayed suggest that
Williams is willing to entertain as best he can when occasion and
audience so indicate. But as far as he's concerned, us college
graduates (and dropouts) should relish the ideas and information he
provides so abundantly and find nothing less than full-fledged
aesthetic satisfaction in his profound, subtle, and inventive command
of voice and persona, format and shape.

Nevertheless, or hence, Williams remains a surprisingly obscure figure
among left-leaning Americans. At best, they may have read Culture
and Society, though they've just as likely taken on Thompson's
Making of the English Working Class, which is three times as
long. But their taste in culture theory probably runs to various Big
Frankfurters and Big Frogs, some nouvelle cassoulet of
Benjamin-Adorno-Marcuse-etc. and Barthes-Foucault-Derrida-etc.; those
who retain a nostalgic yen for ideas formulated in the English
language probably prefer American-style quasi-structuralists like
Fredric Jameson (for politicos) or Harold Bloom (for aesthetes), or
leftist art-critic-plus John Berger, or Williams's star student and
fond patricide, Terry Eagleton. All of whom, I contend, would have had
a much dodgier time reaching their audience if Culture and
Society hadn't cleared the way.

It's difficult now to comprehend the radical impact of Culture and
Society, not just because its hard-earned premises have long since
been absorbed as commonplaces, but also because from the first its
acclaim was so broadly based. In Britain Williams's account of the
evolution of the term "culture" in English letters was praised even by
Tories who disdained his sentimental attachment to the lower classes,
and here the book was reviewed enthusiastically by Irving Howe,
Michael Harrington, Harold Rosenberg, and Alfred Kazin--all except
Kazin socialist sympathizers to be sure, but every one a big-name
highbrow, which was what counted in the status-hungry
U.S. intellectual product market. Here, there, and everywhere,
Williams was chided for his "over-solemn" style, but his fairness and
thoroughness were so palpable that even his natural enemies found it
in themselves to forgive his willful originality and steadfast
leftism. And at the same time his natural allies were galvanized.

In Britain, the catalyst wasn't just the book's content but the very
idea of the thing, and of the man who wrote it. At a time when the
nation's remaining left intellectuals were split philosophically
between crude Stalinoid economism and mealy-mouthed quasi-Fabian
reformism, when the hot young writers were ravening existentialists
like Colin Wilson and William Golding or once-angry strives like
Kingsley Amis and John Braine, Williams stood up as an explicitly
working-class left socialist whose enormous intellectual ambition
would have been deemed arrogant in a showier, less circumspect
man. With figures like Hoggart and Thompson and Hall and Berger and
Doris Lessing and Arnold Wesker and Alasdair MacIntyre peeping out
after the twin shitstorm of Budapest and Suez, the British new left
was slowly beginning to recognize itself, and like its American
counterpart of a few years later it had its own ideas about how
leftists should relate to what economism dismisses as the
superstructure. Committed in their personal lives to sensibility as
well as to justice, these people had no intention of submerging
irreducible aesthetic experiences in ideology. But they were
nevertheless suspicious of the traditional British reluctance to
embark upon grand theoretical projects. Especially with such congenial
thinkers as Gramsci, Lukács, Goldmann, and the Big Frogs all but
unknown in the English-speaking world, Williams emerged as both an
inspiration and a citable authority; 1961's The Long
Revolution, planned from the start as the social-history
counterpart of Culture and Society, proved at least as
influential on the left as its companion volume.

If only because it's always been so specific to British needs,
however, Williams's charisma has eluded Americans, and though he's
been well reviewed in this country, his reputation here rests
primarily upon Culture and Society itself. Now, Culture and
Society is certainly Williams's most comprehensive and momentous
work, and in an odd way it's his most representative as well. There's
no more accessible introduction to the style and scope of his thought,
to its dogged complexity, its difficult yet dazzlingly commonsensical
insights, its contained confidence, its formal canniness, and above
all its balance. It epitomizes both his willingness to learn from the
other side's struggle to understand its historical predicament and his
sharp overriding awareness of whose side he's on--of the way the world
presents itself to the union loyalists, small farmers, housewives,
night-school students, and other set-upon citizens who constitute "the
people." But to most of his allies today (and to Williams himself),
Culture and Society sometimes actually seems slanted in the
direction of such reactionaries as Burke and Carlyle and T.S. Eliot,
Furthermore, it soft-pedals Williams's politics, which in any case
were at their most conciliatory during the '50s, remembered by Williams
as a period of "disgusted withdrawal" for him no matter how much his
unflagging commitment impressed his even more disgusted potential
comrades.

Yet though Williams says Culture and Society now seems "a book
written by someone else," he still holds that it played a crucial role
in redefining the politics of "this strange, unsettling and exciting,
world." For while from here it may be regarded as a narrowly literary
project that betrays his lingering sense of obligation to F.R. Leavis,
who had redefined the study of English at Cambridge by the time
Williams returned to his undergraduate scholarship after three years
manning a tank in World War II, in fact it goes up against the
fundamentals of Leavisism. Although it certainly makes judgments, it's
nowhere near as hierarchical, as politely snobbish, as obsessed with
"discrimination." More important, the tradition it invents doesn't
comprise works of art in all their organic, undidactic glory. It's a
tradition of social commentary, mostly by essayists or by poets and
novelists acting as essayists, occasionally embodied or even
(shocking!) formulated as abstract propositions within living works of
art. Yet what Williams values as much as the ideas in such writing is
its personal stamp, the same kind of ineluctable individual voice
fetishized by Leavis, the new critics, and soon the whole of Western
cold war aesthetic ideology. As he puts it in a telling passage:
"Burke's writing is an articulated experience, and as such it has a
validity which can survive even the demolition of its general
conclusions."

In the end, one of the deep satisfactions of Culture and
Society is the way it maintains the same kind of tension between
"articulated experience" and "general conclusions," and one of its
hidden disappointments is its failure to formulate that tension
abstractly. This is not a book with a neatly summarizable thesis--for
all its analytic reach, its triumph is one of tone and structure and
especially method rather than argument. As Williams explained to a
convocation of lefter-than-thou colleagues and students in 1967, its
conception is oppositional, countering the candid
religious-reactionary conservatism of T.S. Eliot, the covert
humanist-liberal conservatism of Leavis, and the economist
reductionism of Marxists who believe that the "superstructure" of art
and ideology exerts no influence on the economic "base," that it
merely reflects or mediates or typifies a determinative mode of
production. Though in an oft-cited and significant introductory note
he promises to trace the evolution of the words "industry,"
"democracy," "class," "art," and "culture" from 1780 to 1950, that
isn't what he does, not in any schematic way. Instead he unravels the
"vital strand" of English thought in which old values are
recontextualized by (capitalist) material progress, and in doing so
demonstrates, quite politely, that the elitism of Eliot and Leavis
(not to mention the Marxists) isn't necessarily shared by the culture
theorists who preceded and engendered them. Here, for instance, is
Edmund Burke himself. "I have never yet seen any plan which has not
been mended by the observations of men who were much inferior in
understanding to the person who took the lead in the business."

Of course, like anybody with the stuff to launch an informed and
innovative attack on elitism, Williams can claim elite status
himself. This prospect oppresses him. Like the protagonist of his
novel Second Generation, he chose never to complete his
doctorate, but the decision hurt, and if Culture and Society
seems to respond only indirectly to Marxist tradition while tackling
academic orthodoxy with inordinate passion, that's one reason
why. Especially in the '50s, he couldn't shake his fascination with
the citadels of learning--of "culture"--that he'd breached with such
effort and rejected with such ambivalence. And despite the cavils of
allies whose privileges of birth--of class, generation, or both--have
eased their own relationship with the academy, this orientation is
anything but misdirected. The above from which capitalist ideology is
generated is most often located in an ivory tower, which means that
academic truisms quickly degenerate into virulent middlebrow
cliches. It's clear enough that Leavis and his minions were the target
of Williams's comment on Leavis's beloved George Eliot: "It has passed
too long for a kind of maturity and depth in experience to argue that
politics and political attachments are only possible to superficial
minds." But since the '50s this fiction has become the standard copout
of literally millions of real and would-be aesthetes:
neo-expressionist painters, progressive rockers, comic-book
collectors, balletomanes, regional theater honchos, you name it.

In fact, it's only Williams's kind of scholarship that leaves me free
to treat this chronic idealist bromide so scornfully. During a decade
of research that began when T.S. Eliot's Notes Towards the
Definition of Culture got him thinking in 1948, Williams became
something of an expert on all the manifestly unsuperficial minds to
stray toward the political since the advent of the spinning jenny. He
soon found that what the Leavisites encapsulated in a notion of
"culture" that signified either highfalutin minority art or unspoiled
preindustrial community was invariably connected, by the sharpest
contemporary observers of the growth (and depredations) of English
industrialism, to "society"--to explicit consideration of class and
power. It was by working according to the same premises--in the
tradition of Coleridge and Cobbett, of Orwell and Caudwell--that
Williams made his methodological mark.

At the same time, Culture and Society developed Williams's own
broad basic version of this tradition, one he's pretty much stuck to
ever since. Although he grew up in a village near the Welsh-English
border and has always honored rural life and the interpersonal
day-to-day, he welcomes popular education and refuses to
sentimentalize the human relations of the pastoral past, be it Eliot's
Middle Ages or Leavis's mid-19th century; in a credo any historian of
culture should recite thrice daily, he declares: "If there is one
thing certain about `the organic community,' it is that it has always
gone." But at the same time he has little use for romantic alienation,
for the bohemian exile who thinks "society as such as totalitarian,"
emphasizing instead "the relative normality of the artist" and the
power of art, "by affecting attitudes towards reality, to help or
hinder the constant business of changing it." Yet sane and
forceful though this formulation may be, it really isn't the source of
the book's power, which is more a matter of "articulated experience"
than of "general conclusions"--inhering first, as I've said, in its
premises and method, and second in its tone and structure.

Maybe Williams is too solemn, but he's certainly convincing, and
Culture and Society is the prototype. Like all his nonfiction,
it's written in the knobby, inelegant voice of a man honestly
struggling to figure things out--a little donnish, perhaps, but in a
disarmingly sincere and clumsy way. Next to "culture" itself, the
author's favorite words are clearly "difficult" and "complex"; the
book is replete with phrases like "the difficulties are obvious" and
"a very complex system of specialized developments." He's forever
doubling back on himself, or harumphing asides that neither provide
needed diversion nor prove what a witty fellow he is. And if the
apparent byways of the argument are often stern gibes at class
prejudice--at the mean irony of Arnold ("a stock reaction to `the
vulgar' which is surely vulgar in itself") or the cautious irony of
Tawney (whose "manner before the high priests is uneasy"), at
misconceptions about adult education or mob violence--who'll be
tempted to gainsay them? They obviously come from a man who's studied
his field and learned his place.

Learned his place like hell. For in effect Williams has mastered the
usages of scholarship so he can turn the tables on the dons who taught
him so much and undervalued his experience so profoundly. Anyone who
doubts it should ponder the "Conclusion" of Culture and
Society. A 44-page essay that bears no chapter number, bursting
with only a page break out of Chapter 6 of Part III ("George Orwell"),
it's a structurally audacious kicker to what is in form if not content
a proper critical history, proceeding unflappably from certified
bigdome to certified bigdome. Rather than humbly summing up or grandly
expanding upon the wisdom already received, it takes the discussion
into enemy territory: mass and working-class culture. In the '50s, of
course, up-and-coming bigdomes spouting mass-culture theory were as
common as dissertations on Henry James, but not like Williams. As
you'd expect, he steers well clear of both reactionary and left
elitism, and in addition refuses the nostalgic out of such
well-meaning democrats as Richard Hoggart, who in The Uses of
Literacy sets up an invidious comparison between mass
communications and the homely entertainments of his youth in Leeds
(for an American version, see Oscar Handlin's "Comments on Mass and
Popular Culture"). Williams doesn't go this way because he doesn't buy
the whole concept of the mass: he's willing to use the term
adjectivally, but he's deeply suspicious of its origins in "masses,"
which he labels "a new word for mob." In the most simply memorable
sentences he ever wrote, he puts it quite bluntly: "To other people,
we also are masses. Masses are other people."

Yet although Williams's good sense about modern popular forms has
proceeded as one might hope from this beginning--he has never panicked
over the supposedly built-in perceptual perversions of new media,
always extended his interest in drama to movies and television, and
has even said that new communications technologies signaled "a new
phase of civilization"--in the end he's more taken with modern popular
processes than with modern popular products. His assessment of "mass
culture"--"the strip newspaper, the beer advertisement, the detective
novel"--isn't a whole lot more enthusiastic than Hoggart's might
be. His analysis of working-class culture, however, is far more
radical than Hoggart's praise for club singing and Peg's
Paper. After all, Williams says, mass-disseminated forms are
rarely created by "working people" anyway, and why would we expect
them to be? Working people don't create cultural objects, they create
cultural institutions. "Culture in the narrower sense" is the special
province of bourgeois individualists, leaving the working class with
its own project: "The culture which it has produced, and which it is
important to recognize, is the collective democratic institution,
whether in the trade unions, the cooperative movement or a political
party." As Williams observes, a little dryly, this is "a very
remarkable creative achievement"--no less so, and perhaps more so,
because it's collective, prefiguring the "common culture" he believes
human beings must achieve.

Imagine what it might have been like for E.M.W. Tillyard, the
Cambridge tutor who before the war dismissed Williams's earnest young
Communist Party line on the progressivism of Dickens and Hardy as "a
fantasy," to come upon this sharply reasoned attack on the illusions
of status Cambridge dons hold so dear. And imagine too how it might
have hit fledgling acolytes of literature as they pondered the bomb
and the angry young men in their chambers. By climaxing a respectable
scholarly work with a utopian postscript, Williams unleashed an
unforseen blast of cultural energy. It wouldn't be the last time he
united formal mastery and political effectiveness, but it might yet
prove to have been the best.

That lucky old art-action synthesis has been Williams's abiding goal
ever since, and because his appetite for more democracy--for
socialism, whatever precisely that turns out to mean--is so tenacious
and ingrained, the defeats he's suffered pursuing it have troubled him
even more than they do most writers of radical conscience: you can
turn a deaf ear to your conscience, but not to your entire being. And
then there's a second complication: though politics is the ground of
his existence and the soul of his writing, it's writing that possesses
and sustains him, both as his work and, to an extent that must concern
him, as the subject of his work. No wonder this fervent materialist
insists that culture is material--he'd hardly be content devoting his
life to some chimerical play of ahistorical signifiers.

Williams's '60s were energetic and involved. His resurgent activism
was characteristically unsectarian, his confident creative output
characteristically uncategorizable. He fruitlessly mediated the bitter
disputes engulfing New Left Review when Perry Anderson's group
took over from the old (at 35) guard of E.P. Thompson and Stuart Hall;
joined the Labour Party in time to see the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament vanquished there in 1961 and stayed on till 1966; helped
organize Britain's Vietnam Solidarity Campaign in 1965; conceived and
assembled two versions of The May Day Manifesto in an attempt
to rally the Labour left when Harold Wilson's union and monetary
policies became too much; and chaired the National Convention of the
Left until it dissolved in fractious turmoil after the Conservative
victory of 1970. During the same time he published The Long
Revolution and Border Country, both written in the '50s,
revised his 1952 Drama From Ibsen to Eliot (now Brecht),
did two plays with the BBC, produced numerous major essays and
countless reviews, and completed five books: Communications, a
Pelican adult-education primer regarded by many reviewers as a
dastardly call for the nationalization of culture; Second
Generation, a working-class novel and an academic novel
simultaneously; the iconoclastic Modern Thought, which not only
brought novels into the canon but in 1966 included a chapter comparing
"Tragedy and Revolution"; The May Day Manifesto, first
published privately and then taken by Penguin; and The English
Novel From Dickens to Lawrence.

The English Novel (which I've read since I began writing) is
probably Williams's easiest nonfiction, not for its discursive,
semicolon-studded style but for its subject matter, and his novels
aren't just more fun to read than his cultural writing, they're
richer, in that way fiction has. But Williams's most exciting books of
the period are The Long Revolution and Modern
Tragedy. Though criticized by Thompson for vagueness and
gradualism, The Long Revolution's leftism scandalized
mainstream pundits, and once again structure and method intensified
impact. Bracketing a 50,000-word abstract on creativity and society
and a 25,000-word forecast of the politics of British culture in the
'60s around seven part-critical, part-sociohistorical case studies of
topics Williams had taught in night school, the book's apparently
haphazard structure was as careless of academic decorum (and
authority) as its unassumingly cross-disciplinary reach. And the
topics themselves were ground-breaking: the class and educational
training of 350 literary eminences, the empty-headed history of
"standard" English, the interrelations between what is taken for
strictly formal progress in the theater and power shifts in the
society. These unorthodoxies were compounded by Modern Tragedy,
an all-out attack on the atavistic 20th century theory of tragedy,
which in its craving for ritual insults ordinary human suffering ("The
events which are not seen as tragic are deep in the pattern of our own
culture: war, famine, work, traffic, politics"). Having done the deed,
it makes a somewhat murky but courageous and essential attempt to
resolve the great unanswered question of revolutionary thought: why
men and women in nonreligious, individualistic cultures should be
expected to risk death for a future they'll never see.

It's really Modern Tragedy that marks Williams's turn toward
Marx and Marxism, which get nine entries in its index and none in
The Long Revolution's. Though in a typical nonconformist lapse
he's never declared himself a Marxist per se, modern Marxism has long
been the primary context of his discourse. Attributable in the first
instance to the increasingly ideological tenor of the British new
left, this long-range trend also has roots in Williams's CP days at
Cambridge and follows an intrinsic trajectory of his thought. But it
often remains invisible to the casual observer. If Standford
University Press could find three blurbs that make Modern
Tragedy look like an update of Gilbert Murray, Williams probably
planned it that way. This is a man for whom publish-or-perish is all
but literal, and he has not the slightest hesitation about exploiting
his status as a certified bigdome to do subversive work in academic
subgenres as well as to invent new subgenres himself.

His genre work includes a monograph, George Orwell (1970),
which looks behind the plain-talking persona of Britain's consummate
class exile; a communications text, Television: Technology and
Cultural Form (1974), which comes complete with outlines and flow
charts; two survey-course overviews, Marxism and Literature
(1977) and The Sociology of Culture (1982), both of which take
on Britain's structuralism/Althusserianism epidemic almost by the by;
and two collections, one formidably comprehensive and the other
vaguely thematic. Qualifying as innovations would be the historical
dictionary, Keywords (1976), which finally completes the
lexicography promised in the foreword to Culture and Society,
and a 417-page interview, Politics and Letters (1979), where he
spars skillfully with a tag team of Marxist interlocutors. And
somewhere in between is his greatest book, The Country and the
City (1973), a formal triumph on the order of Culture and
Society taken to a new level of difficulty.

Its ideas crushed down into synoptic concision by Oxford University
Press's strict 60,000-word limit, Marxism and Literature is a
slower read, but Williams has never written anything harder to get
into than The Country and the City. After a brief, thoughtful
personal memoir and a devastating demonstration of how the organic
community has always gone (even for Hesiod in 800 B.C.), he begins his
examinations of pastoral with one of those bombshells I love him for:
the observation that where Virgil's narrator Meliboeus, "the `source'
of a thousand pretty exercises on an untroubled rural delight and
peace," was in fact a dispossessed smallholder remembering the land
that had been grabbed out from under him, Horace's equally celebrated
second Epode, written a few years later, is "the sentimental
reflection of a usurer, thinking of turning farmer, calling in his
money and then, at the climax of the poem, lending it out again."
Great stuff, but it all takes place within 20 pages; as Williams
explores his double theme--arcadia as real estate, a bountiful land
exploited by the rich and worked by the poor--things slow down
precipitously, mostly because his source material (especially the
country-house poems that were his original topic) is often tedious
whatever its documentary value or standing as literature. Tedious for
the general reader, that is--Williams obviously doesn't think so.

In part this is because he has such an appetite for knowledge. And in
part it's because he's so moved by any literary effort--from Jonson or
Hardy, from George Crabbe or John Clare, from Stephen Duck ("still
called with a lingering patronage the `thresher-poet'") or Fred
Kitchen (a farm laborer who entitled his 1939 autobiography Brother
to the Ox). In part, however, it's because unlike the general
reader he isn't blindered by the urban provincialism The Country
and the City means to destroy. This is no anti-urban tract, but it
does redress the distortion of rural reality that's been an orthodoxy
ever since the landed gentry began to equate sophistication with the
town houses where they consolidated their power. As you work your way
in you realize that what's making your eyes glaze over isn't just the
prose or the endemic artificiality of pastoral as a genre. It's that
like all city folk you've been steered away from any systematic
interest in what Marx and Engels, in a phrase Williams will never
completely forgive, branded "the idiocy of rural life"--even though
you live off that idiocy, less opulently than the landed gentry but no
less absolutely.

Williams's unimpeded appreciation of both country and city, not just
in theory but in felt detail, makes him a rarity among writers in the
Marxist tradition--among writers of any kind. Because rural-urban is
one of the great governing tensions of his life, right up there
alongside politics-art, The Country and the City gathers
tremendous resonance. Throughout its second half he juxtaposes the
"knowable community" of the English village against new urban ideas of
collective consciousness--the Jungian mystification in which "the
middle terms of actual societies are excluded as ephemeral," the
revolutionary emphasis on "altered and altering relationships." The
argument gathers momentum until what began as a monograph about
country-house poems blooms into a meditation on imperialism, ecology,
and the deep need of human beings to both escape and hold on to their
childhoods. The way the book moves, building a surprising but
irresistible climax from an almost wearisome accumulation of analysis
and observation, reminds me of how submerged metapolitical themes
finally rush to cognition in the preadolescent protagonists of Henry
Roth's Call It Sleep and Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved
Children. This is criticism with the emotional power of a great
novel--a moving personal document and a prophetic work.

Except for the 1983 monograph Cobbett, The Country and the
City was the last book Williams devoted to specific works of
literature. Over the past dozen years he's produced some of his most
imaginative essays (on Hard Times, Robert Tressell, science
fiction) as well as some of his deadliest (vide Writing in
Society's made-in-Cambridge Shakespeare and Racine papers), but
he's also drawn a sharper line between literature and analysis,
writing novels on the one hand and straight theory on the
other. Williams was an enraptured admirer of Finnegans Wake
when he decided to take up fiction as a vocation in the early '50s,
and although he soon embraced conventional narrative technique, he's
never stopped chafing at what publishers dictate to be publishable
length; like Joyce, he wants his novels to contain whole worlds. He
labors hard at them (several have undergone five or more complete
rewrites over periods of many years), and they're impressive in
several respects--their avoidance of the satiric marginality that
afflicts so many academic settings no less than their judicious
refusal to turn working-class characters into paragons. But they've
never been his most influential or (what hurts) widely read works. So
although like any good Briton he has small taste for system, it's in
philosophical matters that he's made most of his recent impact.

Because metaphysics has been of the essence for left intellectuals in
this time of sectarian impotence, Williams's attention to theory can
be seen as strategic, as defensive practical politics within his real
ambit of power: the left. Keywords and Marxism and
Literature carry on his lifelong battle against establishment
culturati, but more than Culture and Society they're also aimed
at the pet notions of his presumed political allies, not just
vulgar-Marxist base-superstructure dualism but also what he's
described as "a mode of idealist literary study claiming the authority
of Marxism and the prestige of association with powerful intellectual
movements in many fields"--in a word (though one will never do),
structuralism.

Williams is accused with some justice of continuing to trundle out the
base-superstructure model for ritual dissection long after it's lost
its credibility: though of course they all have different names for
it, by now most left culture theorists subscribe to some version of
what Williams calls "cultural materialism," which stresses the
symbiotic relationship between the realm of the imagination and
determinative economic forces. (Williams places special emphasis on
the ambiguity of the verb "to determine," which can imply anything
from mechanical cause-and-effect to the setting of limits that are
always susceptible to further testing.) Nevertheless, his discussion
of the crucial base-superstructure concept--in a seminal 1973 essay
reprinted in 1980's Problems in Materialism and Culture as well
as in Marxism and Literature--remains essential, if only
because all materialist thinkers tend to slip toward its hypostatized
categories in moments of philosophical panic. This applies even to
those who employ the much subtler Gramscian concept of hegemony, which
not surprisingly holds considerable attraction for Williams
himself. He's done some of his most useful work classifying what
Gramsci calls counter-hegemonic modes: whether "oppositional" or
simply "alternative," they're often also "residual" (consider all the
apparent conservatives who've made progressive contributions to
culture theory) or "emergent" (and probably destined for absorption
into an improved hegemony, as in Williams's exemplary "The Bloomsbury
Fraction"). His emphasis is on language and culture as material
practices ("meaning is always produced; it is never merely
expressed") that address "the lost middle term between the abstract
entities, `subject' and `object,' on which the propositions of
idealism and orthodox materialism are erected."

Another way to designate that lost middle term is "experience," a
Leavis keyword that means a lot to Williams's leftist contemporaries,
particularly E.P. Thompson, but has been rejected on grounds of
epistemological instability by upstart British
Francophiles. Typically, Williams hasn't hung on to it with anything
like Thompson's schismatic stubborness; where the historian has
devoted a book-length essay (a long book-length essay) to an
attack on Althusser and his hellspawn, Williams has made a valiant if
self-aggrandizing attempt to turn back what I'll call
sign-and-structure theory by co-opting it into his own view of
culture. There's no need to go into the gruesome details (Marxism
and Literature and The Sociology of Culture are the
relevant texts), but it's worth noting how well Williams's early
theoretical impulses prepared him for the Invasion of the Big
Frogs. His nonspecialist fascination with lexicography immunized him
against the silly semiotic tendency to treat words as synchronic
givens. And he'd devised the term "structure of feeling" to capture
that lost middle term long before structuralism had had its covertly
idealist way with the best minds of the next generation. From the
beginning he's seen it as his mission to get at the synthesis of
subject and object without which humane and effective politics are
impossible.

But as leftists learn again and again, it's easier to make politics
not impossible than to make them possible, and though Williams's
activism has been diligent, his political writing has never been as
visionary as his cultural writing. Sympathizers to his right and left
feel constrained to point out its manifest inconsistencies: this is a
man who was still expressing qualified support for Pol Pot in late
1977, but who also believes that a true bicameral legislature would do
Britain a world of good. Such positions are difficult enough to
support individually, much less in tandem. But as leftists learn again
and again, any wise guy can poke holes in other people's ideas--coming
up with just one that hold water itself is the hard part. Williams is
torn by the same contradictions that rip at all but his most
self-deceived or cold-hearted allies: on the one hand he sees that
reform's ended up next to nowhere, and on the other hand he sees where
revolution's ended up. Because he'd rather risk making a fool of
himself than simply remain mute, he tries to do right by the tactical
matter before him without necessarily piecing it into a totally
systematic worldview. And if these shifts don't render him the most
convincing strategist, they do no dishonor to his articulated
experience. This is also a man who 's elevated "difficult" into a
byword and spent a whole book proving revolution is tragic. There's
nothing glibly armchair-Marxist in his willingness to countenance
contradictions. He makes you swallow them lumps and all.

And then he complicates them even further. Of course neither reform
nor revolution has achieved enough. But Williams has no use for the
armchair shibboleth that they've done nothing for people. As he's
learned about the role of physical force in Chartism and before, as
he's pondered Russia, China, and the third world, his politics have
toughened markedly; it's his considered position that, even in
Britain, "the condition for the success of the long revolution in any
real terms is decisively a short revolution." The evidence of his own
experience has been too overwhelming, however, for him to scoff at the
progress his class has made since 1688--a progress Williams perceives
not in terms of physical comfort but of culture, especially education
and the growth of genuine democratic self-confidence among working
people. As Eagleton has complained in Criticism and Ideology,
this awareness does tend to stymie Williams when he gets into tight
political questions. But he would never have articulated his
experience without it.

There may be reason to fear that Williams's work has peaked. I'm
hampered in this judgment because I don't know his late novels, but
nothing leads me to believe that Williams's fiction will ever have the
impact of his nonfiction. And since Marxism and Literature, his
nonfiction has skirted both the eccentric and the perfunctory. The
Sociology of Culture seems as rehashed as Communications
without the earlier book's modest instructional aura. Problems in
Materialism and Culture provides a wide-ranging overview, but it's
still only a collection by a writer who's never gravitated toward the
born essayist's concision and wit, which goes double for Writing in
Society. Readable though Politics and Letters is, you have
to know Williams's oeuvre to feel the fascination of its revisions and
commentary and autobiography. And The Year 2000 takes a typical
formal leap and falls flat on its face.

The project at hand is an analysis of the crucial decades to come that
doesn't credit utopian/dystopian cliches or cede a specious primacy to
any determinative force--economic, cultural, political, religious,
what-have-you. Williams begins with a searching little disquisition on
futurology as a theoretical practice, then volunteers to make himself
a guinea pig by reprinting for critical examination the 25,000-word
conclusion of The Long Revolution. As it happens, "Britain in
the Sixties" holds up well enough to provide a convenient kicking-off
place. But Williams never subjects it to the kind of scrutiny we've
been led to expect, a scrutiny that might help us think for ourselves
about his continuing biases. Instead of a richly self-referential
speculation, we get a predictably depressive, predictably undespairing
prognosis that's unlikely to read as well in the year 2000 as "Britain
in the Sixties" does now. For Williams's life-long habit of putting
culture before comfort is certainly a bias: in his plausible utopia,
citizens attend lots of electronic meetings and relegate crass
consumer desires to the unenlightened capitalist past. I agree that
Williams's theoretical model, the Club of Rome's limits-to-growth
analysis, isn't taken seriously enough by the paper profligates of
socialist futurology. But somehow I find calls to self-denial less
convincing when they come from prophets who have ascetic tendencies to
begin with.

A product of the '50s, an era of expansive material well-being
whatever its spiritual paucities, "Britain in the Sixties" tempers
sane skepticism with a sense of burgeoning possibility. For this its
author has been called wooly-headed, which may well be true but misses
a crucial point: at some deep temperamental level Williams is so dour
that without access to optimism he's in danger of becoming
unbalanced. As a reader, I don't mind the gravity of his style; in
fact, I take a certain amusement in its graceless refusal to joke
around. But I don't like what his style says about his worldview; I'm
a little suspicious of the experience it articulates. For if there is
a category missing from this determinedly comprehensive body of work,
a human fundamental that rarely seems to cross Williams's mind, it's
pleasure--especially, materialist though he may be, physical pleasure.

Williams almost never theorizes about sex, and he really doesn't like
Freud much. Sex does, however, play a major role in his bildungsroman,
Second Generation, which among other things functions as a
tract against "the old bourgeois fantasy" of "the personal break-out,
through sex"--a theme that both charges and narrows the book. The
climactic epiphany comes when the protagonist and his true love go
dancing, apparently to rock and roll of some sort. For Williams, this
scene is a striking achievement. Despite dribs and drabs of
approbation for the symphony here, jazz there, insurgent pop somewhere
else, he rarely evinces any feeling for nonverbal art (his awkwardness
around painting and sculpture seriously cramps The Sociology of
Culture). It's also one of the few places in any of his books that
this half-witting champion of popular culture actually enjoys
any. True, in the television columns he wrote for The Listener
at the turn of the '70s, some glimmers of fun flicker through. But
even that casual context occasions remarks like: "There are laughs of
so many kinds. Those induced don't usually last."

A key to Williams's anti-hedonism is "Advertising: The Magic System,"
a circa-1959 essay that in its grimly acerbic way is as visionary a
piece of left culture theory as Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Williams acknowledges
advertising's news function and its crucial ancillary role in the
growth of the democratic press, but he loathes what it's become: in
his opinion, not merely the instigator of dysfunctional desire but the
chief means whereby capitalism deflects attention from its inability
to provide basic social needs. I know of no more devastating account
of consumerism as a pathology. But Williams's hostility to consumption
is clearly a little pathological too, tied as it is to an obsession of
his own: production. His refusal of the passive mode is too unbending;
his critique of sensationalism verges on the prissy and
puritanical. Not only does he find it hard to respect people's right
to be lazy, but he won't understand that the modern need to get done,
turned on, zapped, even blitzed isn't always the result of media
manipulation. In an information-saturated environment that isn't going
to get much less volatile under any kind of socialism an
anti-authoritarian like Williams wants to see, such needs are also
legitimate aesthetic responses, often to works by artists who have as
much claim to speak for and to working people as he does.

For if Williams is exceptionally curious and open, he's also rather
guarded and chauvinistic. Somewhere within him there's an
affinity-meter that operates on a pass-fail system. If like Burke or
Eliot you edge into the black (or is it the red?), he'll give you
everything's he got, but if you fall short, beware: Williams can be
brazenly small-minded about work he doesn't approve of, especially
smash middlebrow succés d'estime in which he detects the fatal virus
of cynicism--Smiley's People ("an owlish confirmation of deep
inner betrayals") or The Threepenny Opera ("cold-hearted muck
about the warm-hearted whores and engaging crooks"). He seems
virtually unaware that there's any such thing as American literature
except in his academic specialty, drama, where he stops at Miller and
Williams--as you'd expect from someone who'd no sooner endorse
modernism than formalism and who doesn't bother himself much with the
20th century avant-garde. His astute comments on social marginality
proceed from a fascination compounded of clear-eyed sympathy and dark
suspicion--this is not a man inclined to believe that anything
enduring can emanate from bohemia.

Both his distrust of simple pleasure and his distrust of arty arcana
make Williams look like a cultural conservative, and in important
respects that's what he is. But there's another way of putting it, as
anyone who's absorbed Culture and Society should
recognize. Like the backward/forward-looking movers of that saga,
Williams refuses extremes of bourgeois individualism--both the easy
availability of consumer culture and the recondite self-involvement of
minority culture. I think this is a mistake. Whatever the perils of
these modern/modernist options, they're so vivid for people that much
of the century's best art engages them, and if postmodernism turns out
to mean anything it will necessarily achieve some synthesis of the
two. Still, I also think it's a mistake to dismiss Williams's pet
notion of artistic progress, in which the culturally dispossessed find
their own voices, arriving at a kind of homely yet formally innovative
realism-plus which bears the same relation to Williams's beloved
realism that his cultural materialism does to materialism as it's
ordinarily understood. You might even point at the quasi-postmodernist
art--the Latin American novel, say, or Yookay semipop--that does both
these things at once.

In fact, if you were feeling particularly perverse, you could try to
squeeze Williams into quasi-postmodernism himself. I don't mean to
slight the practical political value of his work, especially since its
unstylish usefulness is intrinsic to its aesthetic effect. But I think
there's a clue to Williams's hopes for himself (as distinct from the
world) in his 1964 essay on that urbane Scots empiricist David Hume,
now reprinted in Writing in Society. In high Althusserian
dudgeon, Eagleton has sniffed that Hume would seem "an unlikely
candidate" for Williams's praise, given the "anti-intellectualism" of
Hume's reversion to direct sensory experience. But Williams makes
clear that he shares this kind of anti-intellectualism. He has peered
into the abyss of absolute skepticism and decided that if it comes
down to a choice between life and metaphysics, he'll take life, thank
you very much. And in any case there's an equally pressing if less
noble reason for his interest--Hume's neglected stature as pure
writer.

Williams tips his hand with an uncharacteristically elegant opening
sentence: "In the republic of letters a man can live as himself, but
in the bureaucracy of letters he must continually declare his style
and department, and submit to an examination of his purpose and
credentials at the frontier of every field." He wonders whether Hume
should be classified as "moralist, logician, historian, essayist," and
then quotes Boswell, who called him "quite simply, `the greatest
Writer in Britain,'" and Hume himself, who described the "Love of
literary Fame" as his "ruling Passion." Williams approves, arguing
that "we can read Hume, sensibly and centrally, as a writer, and that
this literary emphasis not only does not weaken his importance as a
philosopher, but is even fundamental to it." By now he's plodding like
himself again ("weaken his importance" indeed) and thus set apart from
Hume's unrepentant hedonism (enough is enough), but he clearly
identifies with the philosopher--with his "curiosity and ambition" and
his "subtlety of reference not wholly separable from confusion," with
his attachment to society and his conviction that a skeptic must
always be skeptical of his own skepticism. And also, one must suspect,
with his "Love of literary Fame."

Moralist, historian, essayist, sociologist, reviewer, literary
scholar, communications theorist, political thinker, Williams refuses
to submit his purposes and credentials to the bureaucracy of
letters. He feels he's earned the respect he accords Hume--he wants to
be seen simply as a writer. But he's not beyond classification: just
as it isn't unreasonable to call what Hume does philosophy, it isn't
unreasonable to call what Williams does criticism. Williams will
object. He can't stand the Leavisite association of "criticism" with
consumption-oriented abstractions like "taste," "cultivation," and
especially "judgment," all of which separate "response from its real
situation and circumstances," and he thinks "the young Marxist
anti-realists" are just as bad: "this culture is rotten with
criticism." Yet his best writing does respond to other writing, and
naturally enough it shows just the salutary sense of context he
prescribes--it both engages historical, sociological, political, and
philosophical contingencies and candidly originates with a specific
individual.

Something like the great Eric Blair character George Orwell, who (as
Williams points out) manipulated language to convince us that content
determined what words he used, Williams criticizes criticism as he
plays the critic-in-spite-of-himself, and while I don't think his
reluctant-professor persona is as self-conscious a mask as Blair's
decent-Englishman, it's clearly a literary creation. If unlike Hume he
isn't running for "greatest Writer in Britain," that's only because
his distaste for judgment is real--as real as the socialist principles
that inspire it. And of course his socialist principles effectively
eliminate him from the competition. His natural enemies continue to
regard him with respectful condescension, even more for his loyalty to
a Marxist tradition that's now counted passé on top of everything else
than for his small interest in what Hume called "Elegance and
Neatness," which as Williams notes "is what the literary pursuit was
often and is still often understood to be." Meanwhile, those allies
who continue to honor the great-man theory--and there are many who are
secretly quite slavish about it--disqualify him on doctrinal and/or
realpolitikal grounds.

Though I wouldn't think of nominating anybody for greatest Writer
anywhere, I have to say that Williams's non-Marxist affinity with
Marxism seems to jibe with the promise and broken promises of that
great secular religion, just as his affirmation of the vital values of
minority culture jibes with his unflinching refusal of its
niceties. What's more, I think it's determinative economic forces that
have prevented him from pulling off another art-action synthesis on
the order of Culture and Society; his interventions in the
popular leftism of the late '60s and the elitist leftism of the '70s
are realpolitik enough for me. In a lifetime of deeply imaginative,
formally adventurous writing, he's made more sense than anyone about
the conjunction between art and society, commenting tellingly on an
amazing range of other matters while doing so. I wish he were more
fun, but I'm not going to make a federal case out of it. I hope he
learns to enjoy the occasional cynical laugh before he dies. And I
hope he lives to see the revolution--long or short, I don't care.

A Reader's Guide

Culture and Society (Columbia University, 1958): For
convenience's sake, think of it as an account--from a British (in
fact, English) perspective--of the religion of art which so many
basically self-interested secular humanists have subscribed to since
the dawn of industrialism. Not by any means an unsympathetic account,
either--like most religions, this one has its points.

The Country and the City (Oxford University, 1973): Jean
Renoir: "It is practically the only question of the age, this question
of primitivism and how it can be sustained in the face of
sophistication." Raymond Williams: "The common idea of a lost rural
world is then not only an abstraction of this or that stage in a
continuing history (and many of the stages we can be glad have gone or
are going). It is in direct contradiction to any effective shape of
our future."

Marxism and Literature (Oxford University, 1977): You don't
have to be Marxist to love Marxist culture theory, which for all
Marxism's history of philistinism and suppression has thrown up
thinkers (Gramsci, Bakhtin, Brecht, Benjamin, Barthes, Jameson, maybe
even Williams) and categories (hegemony, class, third world, popular
front) unrivaled in their power to point beyond the enervating
modernist cliches of the Euro-elite. For anybody prepared to spend 24
hours reading it, this 212-page condensation is a dandy little intro.

Problems in Materialism and Culture (Verso, 1980): Though
Williams's formal impact--his sense of pace, shape, and specific
gravity--is book-weight, I recommend this collection to those seeking
a multi-faceted once-through. Except for "Advertising: The Magic
System," the 14 essays are from the '70s. Other highlights: the
sharply anti-liberal "A Hundred Years of Culture and Anarchy," the
two-part précis of cultural materialism, and "The Bloomsbury
Fraction," which brings off the nearly impossible feat of analyzing
social group as creative actor.

Second Generation (Horizon, 1964, out of print): It's cited
less admiringly than Williams's father-and-son novel Border
Country, but I prefer this slightly awkward follow-up. Its
fundamentally fair-minded depiction of academic life has a nasty edge
and cuts deeper than Lucky Jim's comedy of manners or A New
Life's alienated psychologizing, and its working-class detail is
almost as convincing as Saturday Night and Sunday
Morning's. Plus glimpses of how seriously Williams takes sex.

The Long Revolution (Columbia University, 1961): "Britain in
the Sixties" is a little dated, as are Williams's speculations on the
physiology of creativity. But the theory is clear, concise, and
complex, and the dissection of one of his pet peeves, "correct"
pronunciation, is only the most entertaining example of how
devastating he can be when he goes head-to-head with class prejudice.

Modern Tragedy (Stanford University, 1966): Part One, "Tragic
Ideas," which details the mystification of tragedy in 20th century
academia, ranks with Williams's most trenchant writing. Part Two,
"Modern and Tragic Literature," bogs down a bit (Camus and Doctor
Zhivago?), and overreaches when it attempts to rationalize
revolutionary sacrifice--"the paradox of a man saving his life through
losing it." Williams can't quite face the fact that the survival of a
society means nothing to someone who gives his or her life for it once
that individual's life is gone--unless there's pie in the sky when you
die, the most objectively counter-revolutionary of all religions
bromides. Nevertheless, he proves himself less obtuse and/or
mystagogic than most philosophers of revolution merely by addressing
the subject.

Politics and Letters (Verso, 1979): If you've gotten this far,
even with a little skipping, you're ready for some gossip. The
autobiographical reminiscences from the normally reticent Williams are
quite gratifying. As are the searching if sometimes inconclusive
clarifications and adjustments elicited by interviewers Perry
Anderson, Anthony Barnett, and Francis Mulhern.

The English Novel From Dickens to Lawrence (Merrimack, 1970):
Lapsed English majors start here. Williams bypasses Austen because he
wasn't ready for her (though he was by the time of The Country and
the City, which reprises several of the ideas here, sometimes
almost verbatim). But he's great on Dickens, Hardy, Lawrence, and the
Brontës, who are honored with an early feminist analysis.

Keywords (Oxford University, 1976): I thought I'd consume these
110 critical lexicographies like bon-bons, which was foolish of
me--they go down more like beef jerky, giving you plenty of time to
wonder what he'd find in the history of such dangerous words as "fun,"
"death," "self" (or, as Greil Marcus suggests, such supposedly
outmoded ideals as "courage" and "patriotism"). Nevertheless, his
demolition of bourgeois shibboleths like "career," "charity,"
"educated," his clarification of Marxist concepts like "determine,"
"materialism," "mediation," and his battle for disputed territory like
"humanity," "tradition," "realism," and of course "culture" make this
a book even those with no special yen for Williams should look at.

Additional Reader Tips:

Five of the 14 essays in Writing in Society are superb, none
more so than a 50-page disquisition on the class assumptions of
rhetorical stance written as an introduction to The Pelican Book of
English Prose. Despite a nod or two at the anti-sex league,
Orwell, which Williams pulled back from as his politics moved
left in the '70s, is damn near definitive on a 20th century rival who
fascinates him almost as much as Lawrence. Border Country is
memorable for its nature writing and for its minute, undogmatic
description of how the General Strike of 1926 affected one Welsh
railway station. The political failures of The Year 2000 are
mitigated by astutely updated culture theory. Though Drama From
Ibsen to Brecht predates Culture and Society, Williams has
never again described artistic evolution so thoroughly. The
Sociology of Culture is like a mid-'70s James Brown album--enough
to prove his genius to history should none of his other work
survive. Communications needn't be read by anybody with access
to Culture and Society or The Long
Revolution. Television: Technology and Cultural Form is
admired by communications prof.